Found 45 article(s) for author 'Taxation'

Effects of Austerity: Expenditure- and Tax-based Approaches. Alberto Alesina, Spring 2019, Paper, “Sometimes governments need to reduce their budget deficits aggressively. These policies are labeled “austerity.” Almost always austerity is needed because excessive debt has been accumulated, as a result of policy mistakes and political distortions (Alesina and Passalacqua 2016; Yared, in this issue). The austerity policies embraced by several European countries starting in 2010 have generated an extraordinarily harsh policy debate. One side has argued that austerity is (almost) always a bad idea. From this perspective, even European countries that were experiencing serious difficulties in financial markets—either by being totally cut off from borrowing like Greece, or by paying high risk premia like Portugal, Spain, Ireland, and Italy—should have continued to stimulate their economies with high levels of government spending. Austerity, the argument continues, was self-defeating because the recessions it induced, or extended, only increased government debt as a ratio of GDP. Blanchard and Leigh (2014) argued that this round of austerity was particularly costly: in other words, fiscal multipliers were especially high. The other side argued that postponing austerity would have caused Effects.” Link

Debate: Tax Competition and Global Interdependence. Mathias Risse, April 29, 2019, Paper, “We are very grateful for written comments and feedback from Andreas Cassee, Peter Dietsch, Joachim Helfer, Martin O’Neill, Thomas Rixen, Kate Vredenburgh, Gabriel Wollner, and two anonymous referees. Peter Dietsch engaged with our article at various stages and each time provided extremely generous responses. We are grateful for the opportunity to present earlier versions of this article and receive productive feedback at the Colloquium for Political Philosophy, Humboldt University Berlin; the Political Theory Workshop, University of York; and the Political Theory Workshop, University of Hamburg. Marco Meyer gratefully acknowledges financial support from the Leverhulme Trust.” Link

A broader tax base that closes loopholes would raise more money than plans by Ocasio-Cortez and Warren. Lawrence Summers, March 28, 2019, Opinion, “Tax reform debates have been transformed in recent weeks by a shift in emphasis from revenue raising and progressivity to an emphasis on going after the rich for the sake of equality and justice. Bold proposals from Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, for a 70 percent marginal tax rate on top earners, and from Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts — a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate — for a wealth tax on those worth more than $50 million have attracted widespread attention.” Link

Monetary Alchemy, Fiscal Science. Jeffrey Frankel, January 17, 2019, Opinion, “The year 2013 marks the 100th anniversaries of two separate major institutional innovations in American economic policy: the Constitutional Amendment enacting the federal income tax, ratified on February 3, 1913, and the law establishing the Federal Reserve, passed in December 1913.” Link

Re-Reading George H.W. Bush’s Lips. Jeffrey Frankel, December 10, 2018, Opinion, “The late president showed a “profile in courage” in 1990, when he met the Democrats halfway to achieve fiscal responsibility. Unfortunately, his presidency was the last time any Republican has tried to live up to the label of fiscal conservative.” Link

Revisiting the uneasy case for corporate taxation in an uneasy world. Mihir Desai, October 31, 2018, Paper, “Just as the public increasingly wants corporate taxation to serve as a mechanism for ensuring that business contributes to society, the sustainability of corporate taxation is increasingly under challenge by a changing global landscape. This tension between the heightened demands placed on the corporate tax system and its reduced capacity prompts the question: How can an increasingly tenuous fiscal instrument be modified to accommodate rising expectations? In this paper, we address this question by reviewing the empirical evidence on, and conceptual underpinnings of, the corporate tax. We place the taxation of corporations in a wider context that links it to ongoing debates on corporate law and governance and on corporate social responsibility.” Link

Taxation and Innovation in the 20th Century. Tom Nicholas, Stefanie Stantcheva, September 2018, Paper, “This paper studies the effect of corporate and personal taxes on innovation in the United States over the twentieth century. We use three new datasets: a panel of the universe of inventors who patent since 1920; a dataset of the employment, location and patents of firms active in R&D since 1921; and a historical state-level corporate tax database since 1900, which we link to an existing database on state-level personal income taxes. Our analysis focuses on the impact of taxes on individual inventors and firms (the micro level) and on states over time (the macro level).” Link

Taxes for health: evidence clears the air. Lawrence Summers, April 5, 2018, Opinion, “Although this argument may look appealing, clear thinking combined with good evidence reveals its many fallacies. An ethical judgment about taxing harmful products cannot rely on the question of tax regressivity alone. Rather, it requires consideration of all the effects, including the associated health…” Link

Debate: The US International Tax Reforms: Competition and Convergence, Pay-Offs and Policy Failures. Stephen Shay, 2018, Paper, “The recent US tax reform’s international provisions are difficult for policymakers in other countries to comprehend. They are complex and in certain instances inconsistent with US international undertakings. Observers can best understand the…” Link

What Do Trade Agreements Really Do? Dani Rodrik, February 2018, Paper, “As trade agreements have evolved and gone beyond import tariffs and quotas into regulatory rules and harmonization, they have become more difficult to fit into received economic theory. Nevertheless, most economists continue to regard trade agreements such as the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) favorably. The default view seems to be that these arrangements get us closer to free trade by reducing transaction costs associated with regulatory differences or explicit protectionism. An alternative perspective is that trade agreements are the result of rent-seeking, self-interested behavior on the part of politically well-connected firms – international banks, pharmaceutical companies, multinational firms.” Link

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